:EA/free/improv:After the trio with Phonotopy, but recorded a couple of month earlier, Diatribes proposes with Abdul Moimême a new electroacoustique oriented album, where the instrumentation distinction is lost to the benefit of a sounds ensemble strongly linked by skeazing ropes and under permanent tension. Some metalico-organics improvisations develloping under harbour influence, superpostion of poetic evocations like an high-tech nostalgia.

Diatribes is the Geneva-based duo of d’incise, who plays laptop, objects, and percussion, and Cyril Bondi, playing drums and percussion. First coming together in 2004, the duo’s subtle distinguishing mark develops out of Bondi’s relationship to free jazz and d’incise’s relationship to ambient electronica and free improvisation. As environmentally diffused as the sounds may become, Bondi is often knitting at pulse, creating polyrhythms and a momentum that animates the whole, keeping it moving while d’incise pulls sounds from the ether or the street. The spontaneous character of the music is insistently maintained by working constantly with other players, as if Diatribes is only complete when it’s Bondi, d’incise and someone else, as if Diatribes is a principle that always includes the other. The duo has recently released three works, each with a third musician; as different as the guests are, Diatribes manages to create a distinct identity.

Multitude, with bassist Barry Guy, is inevitably influenced by Guy’s own spectacular virtuosity, but it’s also fascinating listening to hear Guy working so intently with improvisers whose fundamental approaches are generally less linear than his own. There is a very close rhythmic connection between Guy and Bondi, evident in the percussive mix of rapid pizzicato bass and drums on “le poids des humeurs.” D’incise’s sounds arise amongst the other two and it is frequently difficult here to demarcate the three. When Guy plays arco, as on “corrosion du possible,” this blurring of identity is even more pronounced, the bassist creating a forest of harmonics and scrapes, sputtering rhythmic figures and sudden movements between registers that seem to spring from and include all the sounds around him (including here the added clarinet of Benoît Moreau). Diatribes, for their part, build up broken fields of percussion and electronic sound, sounding as if their instruments are literally intertwined in the strings of Guy’s bass. Together the three create a world of micro-rhythms and intervals, new patterns interspersing themselves in gaps in time and register.

On Complaintes de Marée Basse with the Lisbon-based guitarist Abdul Moimême, the three musicians seem to be much more aligned in their approach. Moimême plays two prepared table-top guitars, metal objects and small instruments, and both he and d’incise have cymbals in their list of instruments. The playful sound sources extend to Moimême playing metronome and d’incise gramophone. At times the sound is almost industrial—the scraping of metal, the sound of large objects falling—at others it has the most remarkable delicacy, fragile glissandi and barely audible string scrapings. Identity and perspective are constantly changing here. Little noises arise and are gradually subsumed into louder ones or else disappear like unknown but evidently endangered insects in a distant ecosystem. A snare drum rhythm beats against the scratch of a gramophone needle on an exit groove. The sounds are at times so intimate you feel that you are ear-next to a bowed cymbal or a mallet-struck string; at other times the sonic vocabulary of random echoing metal suggests a freight yard, industrial noise in which sound is only a side effect of another process. It is this shifting perspective, this fluctuating succession of different scales—from closet to airplane hangar—that makes this the remarkable dreamscape that it is.

The third Diatribes performance, Partielle d’averse (available as a limited edition mini-CD with a hand-made cover or as a download), was made with Phonotopy, also known as Yann Leguay who’s playing tennis cythar and electric racket. Just over 23-minutes long, it’s a beautifully sustained single piece, Leguay’s transformed sports equipment a perfect complement to Bondi and d’incise. The work is the kind of transforming soundscape that one associates with AMM, a gradual loss and development of identity through audition.

Invisibility, anonymity, and pseudonymity are clearly important here (another Diatribes performance with HKM+ and other German musicians was “recorded in an abandoned building in Leipzig”), for this is music shaped by the acuity of consciousness and the porous frontier of identity, whether of the sound, the instrument or the maker. Watching this music being made might diminish its sonic appeal; living here only in the ear, it elaborates on mysteries of identity which are matters of both cognition and psychology. It’s fitting that some of the works themselves inhabit an area both grey and plural, as limited edition works of art or downloads. Stuart Broomer / http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD32/PoD32MoreMoments4.html